Monday, July 31, 2017

Meredith's Monday Musings: Repetitive Words

Happy Monday and Happy Birthday to Harry Potter! ;-) I’ll always be a fan of Harry’s. Anywho, how are y’all doing? Hopefully, good!

Today’s Meredith’s Monday Musing post is all about: repetitive words!

As an author, one of the biggest killers to our stories is when we overuse certain words. For instance, I’ve been told by my beta reader that I use the words: ‘that’, ‘quick’, and ‘just’ too much. When she first told me this, I thought that couldn’t be true. How many times could a person use the word quick in a story? It isn’t that common of a word. When I searched it, I was shocked to see that I had used the word quick way too much!

Since then, I have tried to make much more of conscious effort to not repeat certain words. Of course, an author can edit their stories a million times and there will always be one or two mistakes that they’ve missed.

The only downside to learning about repetitive words is when I’m reading other authors’ stories now, I find myself noticing if they overuse a certain word. I hate when I do this because I get pulled out of the story. I haven’t found a way to stop this from happening, but I’m really hoping that I do soon. I don’t like to be disrupted while I’m reading.

As readers or fellow authors, do any of you ever notice when an author overuses a certain word or phrase?